A SHUDDER FROM THE PAST
I came to this fresh from admiring two 76-year-olds , Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep, being painfully cool and haughty in a trailer plugging Devil Wears Prada 2. I was also foot-weary from accidentally doing two sides of the vast and gruesome Victorian Brompton Cemetery, which always leads to reflections on long-past lives and deaths. This is a Rodney Ackland revival, well worth it, the Finborough always does these forgotten-plays with great class. In it Catherine Cusack , Abigail Thaw and Julia Watson reminded us what it was like to be an Old Lady in 1935 (and what patronizing attitudes men, including playwrights, often had towards them).
The play is based on a Hugh Walpole novel – never forget that it was he who Stella Gibbons sent up in Cold Comfort Farm. Ackland’s version is less forgotten than some of his plays, having turned up in 1969 and again in 1994 with Miriam Karlin. But it started out as an Edith Evans vehicle and strirred a lot of inter-war feeling. The programme deliciously quotes one critic saying what lonely figures old women were: pathetic, because ‘at least “an old man has his pipe” and the pub.
But yes, pre-welfare old women of the gentry classes, living alone, had it rough, with only the possibility of a “companion” job. And yes – as the programme also says – loneliness still exists now, with “a lack of visibiliy on stage or screen” for older women. Except, obvs, Streep & Wintour and Reid and Routledge and Dench , Berry, Leith, May, Beckett.. OK.
But Walpole knew what he was writing about, especially in that inter-war period when too many “spare women” faced a lifetime alone or as dependents on wider family. However, despite three fabulous perfomances – totally immersed in that past sensibility of warding off both poverty and pity – there was something a touch creepy about the construction and presumptions in Ackland’s play. There’s nice, churchgoing, kindly Lucy (Julia Watson) senior in the boarding-house or home: she has one cousin over the bridge dreams of the return of her wandering son, who is trying to make good abroad or in “land property down south” . She makes the best of life, though suffers a disappointment over a legacy. Then there’s the newcomer Miss Beringer (Cusack deploying a finely-judged series of nervous collapses) who is grieving for her little dog and for a distant friend who gave her a cherished lump of amber. She becomes rapidly terrified of Abigail Thaw’s Mrs Payne (frankly, I was too: this stern gaunt figure in jet beads and funereal broderie roosted mainly in a rocking-chair just in my eyeline and I didn’t dare take notes). Mrs Payne spends the play keeping us guessing as to whether she is a bit “wanting” or actively malevolent.
She may have killed her husband for throwing her gypsy hat on the fire: the text is full of dark suggestions, never completely resolved, though she does produce one hell of a big hat with feathers and fruit all over it to go two doors down to the chemist for nougat. But she wants the lump of amber, and claims this need as part of her natural passionate nature and unfulfilled desire. Gradually the relationships get worse, right up to a slightly unbelievable ex-machina event at the end.
Agatha meanwhile delivers her outspoken conviction that “we’re all old and dull and penniless …we’re not happy. We make no-one else happy”.And suddenly, from the depths of 1935, I sense that patronizing critic at my shoulder, saying how much better it is to be a man, able to alleviate loneliness and draw on a pipe and knowing that “a half-pint if sipped carefully gets him an hour or so of lights and good fellowship at the local”.
So I emerged still loving the Finborough, revering all three fine actresses, but slightly disliking Ackland. Though I did love Before the Party, and hope for a few more in this little powerhouse…
Finboroughtheatre.co.uk
To 19 april
rating 4 for the performances
theatreCat 